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Unexamined Wounds

Once, a Zen master was crossing a river in a boat. A young boy was at its helm. Out of the blue, an empty boat came ramming into it from behind. However, the boy could save it from getting capsized with difficulty.

“People are so careless that they don’t tether their boats properly on the shore. Instead, they leave them floating in the river. This can cause an accident. We are lucky that we didn’t have an accident!” the boy retorted with anger. “One day, a boatman kept tailgating my boat so aggressively that he would have rammed into me if I hadn’t sailed out of his way. Sometimes, I can’t understand the ways people behave so weirdly!”

“Oh, my dear, sometimes the people behave weirdly because of certain compulsions of which they are absolutely ignorant,” the master explained. “The boatman who aggressively tailgated you was compulsively driven to act as he did by his own unexamined wounds. Therefore, he didn’t know what he was doing and had little control over it. People with such wounds are compelled to do the same that has been done to them.”